Cody Wilson

Cody Rutledge Wilson (born January 31, 1988) is an American gun rights activist and crypto-anarchist. He started Defense Distributed, a non-profit organization which develops and publishes open source gun designs, so-called "wiki weapons" created by 3D printing and digital manufacture. Defense Distributed gained international notoriety in 2013 when it published plans online for the Liberator, the first widely available functioning 3D-printed pistol.

Career

Defense Distributed

In 2012, Wilson and associates at Defense Distributed began the Wiki Weapon Project to raise funds for designing and releasing the files for a 3D printable gun. At the time Wilson was the project's only spokesperson; he called himself "co-founder" and "director."

Learning of Defense Distributed's plans, manufacturer Stratasys threatened legal action and demanded the return of a 3D printer it had leased to Wilson. On September 26, 2012, before the printer was assembled for use, Wilson received an email from Stratasys suggesting he was using the printer "for illegal purposes". Stratasys immediately canceled its lease with Wilson and sent a team to confiscate the printer.

While visiting the office of the ATF in Austin, Texas to inquire about the legalities of his project, Wilson was interrogated by the officers there. Six months later, he was given a Federal Firearms License (FFL) to manufacture and deal weapons.

In May 2013, Wilson successfully test-fired a pistol called "the Liberator" which reportedly was made using a Stratasys Dimension series 3D printer purchased on eBay. After test firing, he released the blueprints of the gun's design online through a Defense Distributed website. The State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanded that he remove the files, threatening prosecution for violations of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). In October 2014, Defense Distributed began selling to the public a miniature CNC (computer numerical control) mill named Ghost Gunner to finish "80 percent" receivers, like those used to build the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

In November 2014 Wilson was named to the ''Forbes 30 Under 30'' list, a pick the publication regretted nine years later putting Wilson in its Hall of Shame. On May 6, 2015, Defense Distributed and the Second Amendment Foundation filed ''Defense Distributed v. U.S. Dept. of State'', a constitutional challenge of the ITAR regime used to control speech. On July 10, 2018, the State Department offered to settle the lawsuit and Wilson continued to work at DEFCAD. Wilson briefly resigned from the company in 2018 after being indicted for sexual assault. In September 2019, after accepting a plea deal and probation, he rejoined the company.

Dark Wallet

In 2013, Wilson, along with Amir Taaki, began work on a Bitcoin cryptocurrency wallet called Dark Wallet, a project planned to anonymize financial transactions. He appeared at the SXSW festival in Austin in 2014 to discuss Dark Wallet.

Bitcoin Foundation

On U.S. election day, November 4, 2014, Wilson announced that he would stand for election to a seat on the board of directors of the Bitcoin Foundation, with "the sole purpose of destroying the Foundation." He said, "I will run on a platform of the complete dissolution of the Bitcoin Foundation and will begin and end every single one of my public statements with that message."

Hatreon

In 2017, Wilson launched Hatreon.us, an "alt-right version of Patreon" providing crowdfunding and payment services for groups and individuals banned from platforms including Kickstarter, Patreon, PayPal, and Stripe. The site attracted notable alt-right and neo-Nazi figures such as Andrew Anglin and Richard B. Spencer. Wilson said that Hatreon clients included "right-wing women, people of color, and transgender people"; Bloomberg News reported that most donations went to white supremacists. According to Hannah Shearer, staff attorney at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Hatreon users incited violence contrary to Hatreon's terms of service, which forbid illegal activity.

Hatreon.us claimed to have received about $25,000 a month in donations. The site took a five percent cut of donations. Several months after Hatreon's launch, Visa, the site's payments processor, suspended its financial services. With no means of processing payments, the site became inactive.

Coast Runner Industries

Wilson founded Coast Runner Industries in February 2023. The "Coast Runner" is a CNC milling machine capable of making a wide variety of CNC milled items. Coast Runner Industries was founded in February 2023 by Cody Wilson, Garret Walliman and others, and debuted its first product, the CR-1, on Kickstarter in February of 2024.

In May of 2024, San Diego County, joined by The Giffords Law Center, brought suit against Coast Runner in California state court for violating a state law "blocking gun-making milling machines."

Political and economic views

Wilson claims an array of influences from anti-state and libertarian political thinkers including mutualist theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, paleolibertarian anarcho-capitalists like Austrian School economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and classical liberals such as Frederic Bastiat. His political thought has been compared to the " conservative revolutionary" ideas of Ernst Jünger. Jacob Siegel wrote that "Cody Wilson arrives at a place where left, right—and democracy—disappear" and that he oscillates "somewhere between anarch and anarchist".

Wilson is an avowed crypto-anarchist, and has discussed his work in relation to the cypherpunks and Timothy May's vision. He did not vote in the 2016 United States presidential election. He frequently cites the work of post-Marxist thinkers in public comments, especially that of Jean Baudrillard, whom he has claimed as his "master". Asked during an interview with ''Popular Science'' if the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting affected his thinking or plans in any way, Wilson responded:

... understanding that rights and civil liberties are something that we protect is also understanding that they have consequences that are also protected, or tolerated. The exercise of civil liberties is antithetical to the idea of a completely totalizing state. That's just the way it is.

Wilson is generally opposed to intellectual property rights. He indicated his primary goal is the subversion of state structures and he hopes that his contributions may help to dismantle the existing system of capitalist property relations.

In a January 2013 interview with Glenn Beck about the nature of and motivations behind his effort to develop and share gun 3D printable files Wilson said:

(It's) a real political act, giving you a magazine, telling you that it will never be taken away... That's real politics. That's radical equality. That's what I believe in... I'm just resisting. What am I resisting? I don't know, the collectivization of manufacture? The institutionalization of the human psyche? I'm not sure. But I can tell you one thing: this is a symbol of irreversibility. They can never eradicate the gun from the earth.

Awards

''Wired''s "Danger Room" named Wilson one of "The 15 Most Dangerous People in the World" in 2012. In 2015 and 2017, ''Wired'' said that he was one of the five most dangerous people on the Internet; in 2019 it named him one of the most dangerous people on the internet for the decade.

Personal life

Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, Wilson was student body president at Cabot High School in Cabot, Arkansas and graduated in 2006. He received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) in 2010, where he had a scholarship. While at UCA, Wilson was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and was the president of UCA's student government association. He traveled to China with UCA's study-abroad program.

In 2012, he studied at the University of Texas School of Law but left the university in May 2013 after two years.

On August 2018, Wilson was accused of paying a 16-year-old girl $500 for sex in a hotel room in Austin, Texas. When police issued a warrant for his arrest on September 19, 2018, Wilson was in Taipei, Taiwan. He was arrested by Taiwanese authorities after the U.S. cancelled his passport and therefore, he no longer held a valid visa. Taiwan's National Immigration Agency subsequently deported him to the United States. After his return on September 23, 2018, he was released on $150,000 bond from Harris County Jail in Houston.

On December 28, 2018, Wilson was indicted by the State of Texas for sexual assault, a second-degree felony. Wilson's defense attorney, F. Andino Reynal, stated that Wilson believed the girl to be a consenting adult, and that SugarDaddyMeet.com, the website where they met, required users to declare they are at least 18 years of age before they could create an account.

On August 9, 2019, Wilson pleaded guilty to injury of a child, a third-degree felony, in exchange for a deferred adjudication and a seven-year term of probation. The plea deal kept Wilson from receiving a criminal conviction but required him to temporarily register as a sex offender for the duration of his probation. He was additionally sentenced to 475 hours of community service and a $1,200 fine.

In 2023, ''Vice'' reported that Wilson completed his probation in November 2022, after which the charges and case were dismissed as provided for under the terms of his plea agreement.

Works

Bibliography

* '' Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free''. New York: Gallery Books (2016). .
*

Filmography

;As himself
* ''After Newtown: Guns in America'' (2013)
* '' Print the Legend'' (2014)
* ''Deep Web'' (2015)
* '' No Control'' (2015)
* '' The New Radical'' (2017)
* '' Death Athletic: A Dissident Architecture'' (2023)
;As producer
* '' TFW NO GF'' (2020) A documentary by Alex Lee Moyer.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilson, Cody
1988 births
Living people
21st-century American inventors
Activists from Little Rock, Arkansas
Activists from Texas
American anti-capitalists
American gun rights activists
American libertarians
Crypto-anarchists
Firearm designers
People associated with Bitcoin
Activists from Austin, Texas
People from Cabot, Arkansas
University of Central Arkansas alumni
University of Texas School of Law alumni